Many vehicles are powered by internal combustion engines. The internal combustion engines burn fuel to power the vehicle. The vehicle may be an automobile, a commercial truck, a military vehicle, a construction vehicle, construction equipment, and the like. Often, the internal combustion engines remain on in an idle operating state even when a vehicle is not moving (e.g., when a vehicle is stopped at a stop sign). In these situations, fuel is still consumed by the engines even though the vehicles are not moving. Some vehicles address this problem by employing a start-stop system that automatically shuts down and restarts the internal combustion engines under certain operating conditions in which the vehicle remains in idle for extended periods of time to reduce the amount of fuel consumed by the engines. For example, the engine may be shut off when the vehicle is stopped at a stop light, stopped a train crossing, placed in park, no longer performing construction tasks, etc. However, many potential stop situations may result in excessive battery usage or reduced throttle response. Accordingly, the engine control units (“ECUs”) can be configured to identify appropriate situations to activate the start-stop system, when to disable the start-stop system, and when to activate a stopped engine during a start-stop cycle.
However, some engines are used to provide power to other components, such as secondary systems and accessories of the vehicle. For example, the internal combustion engine of a construction vehicle may be used to provide power to the wheels (i.e., to propel the vehicle), to a hydraulic system to operate a construction device (e.g., a shovel, a crane, a blade, etc.), to an air conditioning unit, and the like. The internal combustion engine may be manufactured separately from the vehicle, and the ECU may not be specifically programmed for the construction vehicle. Further, other engines, particularly hybrid engines (e.g., diesel-electric, diesel-hydraulic, etc.) have a multitude of original equipment manufacturer (“OEM”) supplied components from various OEMs. The OEMs include secondary system providers, accessory providers, vehicle integrators, vehicle customizers, equipment providers, and the like. Accordingly, the ECU of the internal combustion engine may not have the proper programming to account for various systems driven by the internal combustion engine and the components of the engine supplied by other OEMs when making start-stop decisions. Allowing the OEM system controllers to communicate directly with the ECU can result in architectural challenges, such as performance degradation due to increased data latency. Further, embedding a mixture of controller software from multiple OEMs into a single control module potentially exposes each OEM's proprietary software and programming logic to other OEMs involved with the vehicle and/or internal combustion engine. It would be desirable to allow OEMs to contribute to stop-start control without causing performance degradation and without revealing potentially proprietary software and programming logic to other OEMs.